The amount of wireless broadband Internet traffic has increased at a tremendous pace during the last decade. The further development of High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), 4G LTE® and LTE-advanced now enables end users of wireless communication devices (WCDs) to obtain download speeds of tens—or even hundreds—of Mbps. This enables the use of applications with high demands on bitrates and delay. Apart from the challenges in providing high bitrates to users in indoor locations, wireless network operators are experiencing problems related to resource sharing, particularly in urban areas. In urban areas the number of simultaneously attached (and active) users may be high in certain cells of a wireless network. Since radio resources are shared between all users in the cell, the effective bitrate per user will drop inversely proportional (at best) with the number of active users in the cell. During busy hours, the effective bitrates in certain cells may be so low that the applications being run by the end users become “starved,” resulting in TCP timeouts for web browsing, frozen images for video applications, etc. These occurrences are examples of end user congestion.
Cell congestion may arise when the resources of a cell are fully or nearly fully occupied. Cell congestion may lead to end user congestion for individual users if the received bit rate of a WCD in the cell cannot be sustained above an acceptable level over time for the application being used. Cell congestion may also occur without causing end user congestion, such as when a few users are consuming all resources of the cell, but the resulting throughput is generally high for all of the users.